Matt Long had life by the horns—until the day he got crushed by a 20–ton bus. Though the firefighter and Ironman suffered horrific injuries, he somehow survived. Then he had to learn to live again.

When they approach the Queensboro Bridge, the dark, steel–grilled link between Queens and Manhattan near mile 15, the three runners slow down. Long had planned from the start to walk the bridge, hoping not to overtax his aerobic capacity. In training, his longest run was only 14 miles.

He's quiet for most of the walk across the bridge. Every few seconds, as people race by, a runner spots him and yells, "Great job, Matty" or "Way to go, bro," and Long yells back, "I hear ya, bro. We'll catch up to ya soon." Otherwise, he keeps to himself. Finally, at the 16–mile mark, as runners get set to descend a ramp into the canyons of Manhattan, he starts running again.

The idea came in a flash one night. it was as sudden as the alarm that would ring in his old firehouse, and he's still not sure what prompted it. Maybe it came from a lot of little things. Maybe it was the phone calls and e–mails from Shane McKeon, who got the idea that if he trained for an Ironman, and Long could coach him, then Matty might become Matty again. "I left him one message where I said, 'If you don't want to respond to any e–mails, don't, but on a daily basis, I'll tell you where I'm at with my training and what I'm doing," McKeon recalls. He soon got a whiff of the old Matty. "I'll tell you, within three days he was yelling at me, 'Where's my update?'"

Or maybe it was hearing his mom in his head, and recalling what she had already been through—watching her middle–aged son lie unconscious in a hospital, not knowing if he would live or die. Years earlier, she had waited by a hospital bed to see if her husband would survive being gunned down by a mafia member outside a Brooklyn bar. Then there was the car accident a few years later that nearly killed another son, Frank. And, of course, there was 9/11, the day her two firefighting sons, Matt and Jim, didn't call home until that night to let her know they were alive. Maybe she didn't need any more misery herself.

Or maybe it was that psychiatrist. Maybe he had a point. Maybe it was time to let others make him feel good.

Maybe it was all of that, or none of that. All Long knows is that one night he was at home with his brother Eddie, "moaning and crying about everything I had wanted to do. I wanted to break three hours in the marathon. I wanted to run Boston. I wanted to do the Ironman in Hawaii. And then, I just stopped. And I remember saying to Eddie, 'You know, a lot of people want stuff. People want this, people want that. People want to win the lottery. But just because you want something doesn't mean you're going to get it. You got to, you know, work for it.' So right there I just said, 'I will run. And I will run a marathon.'" And just like that, he started on the road back to being Matty Long.

But why a marathon? Months earlier, he'd told friends that if he were ever ready, he'd like to run with them around the Central Park loop they'd done so often. And if he could ever do those six miles, they'd go out for beer and pizza, and he'd be happy. Now, out of nowhere, six miles had mushroomed into 26, even though he still needed crutches to walk one block. Why? "Because that's what I had done before," he said shortly after that night. "To prove that I'm back as an athlete, that's what I have to do."